Category talk:Creatures
Equivalent to 3e era Outsider category? What category do non-fiend non-celestial outsiders go under now? Realized I have no idea where to place the Xill. JEB1981 (talk) 04:47, November 24, 2019 (UTC) * Xill are lawful evil, and as evil outsiders would fall under fiends. BeardWizard (talk) 17:20, November 24, 2019 (UTC) * For reference, the wiki primarily follows D&D 5e monster categorization, which makes all good-aligned outsiders celestials, and all evil-aligned outsiders fiends. Neutral-aligned outsiders have been divided among the other categories: for example, slaad are abberations, githzerai are humanoid, and azers are elementals. This may at some point cause an issue for neutral outsiders which have no official 5e adaption yet, but we can judge each on a case-by-case basis. BeardWizard (talk) 18:16, November 24, 2019 (UTC) ** Your argument that Xill would be fiends makes sense objectively, except the 5e Monster Manual says: "Fiends are creatures of wickedness that are native to the Lower Planes." Whereas these guys are from the Ethereal Plane. The only other Ethereal native I can find is the phase spider, a monstrosity. I think we should avoid assigning any monster with a 5e creature type until there's an official 5e version, to avoid a potential mistake we'd have to correct later on. (Also, the great thing about this wiki is that you don't do homebrew; arguably coming up with our own creature type assignments is homebrew.) Maybe we could include both the 3e and 5e (and 4e) creature types, like the Forgotten Realms wiki does? Seems to work well for them. JEB1981 (talk) 00:15, November 25, 2019 (UTC) *** This is a good point. "Fiend" referred to all evil outsiders in 3e, but only creatures of the Lower Planes in 5e. Looking at a list of 3e evil outsiders, several either changed type in 5e (e.g. oni is now a giant, yeth hound is now a fey) or retroactively changed lore to gain an explicit connection to the Lower Planes to justify their fiend status (e.g. howler, night hag). I agree that it's tricky to categorize creatures like the xill, but so far I usually resolve this by placing it in the closest equivalent category until an official 5e publication resolves the ambiguity. Currently, my general intent is to avoid dividing categories by rules edition the way the Forgotten Realms wiki does it. I feel like this creates too many categories which are not hugely useful; e.g. a spell would be "3rd level spells (1e), 3rd level spells (2e), 3rd level spells (3e) ..." and so on. This would expend a lot of effort in categorizing pages very precisely, which would currently be better spent writing page content. BeardWizard (talk) 06:54, November 25, 2019 (UTC) **** Ehh, I'm really really averse to choosing our own categories for monsters that have yet to appear in 5e. Like I said, that's basically homebrew, and there's too much of that already in D&D wikis; the thing that can make this wiki great and different is to stick to the published facts, so people can come here and see what's officially known about Owlbears or Modrons or Xill. Also, it makes more work for us later, if an official 5e version is made and we have to make changes to everything. And what happens if 6e comes along, and the categories change again? I understand not wanting to create too many categories, but at the same time, does it really do any harm? And I think having each edition's categories establishes a better precedent for the future. JEB1981 (talk) 03:09, November 26, 2019 (UTC) ***** I think my reasoning with the Xill is that since it has no canonical 5e type, the closest canonical approach is to fall back to 3e, in which it is a fiend. This isn't necessarily a perfect solution, but I think it's the best we can do until WotC gives an official answer. BeardWizard (talk) 18:33, November 27, 2019 (UTC) Doing some more research, I've noticed 19 other creatures which appear in the Monster Index as Outsiders with the Evil subtype, but which have no clear connection to any Lower Plane, are not from a setting like Eberron which lacks a Lower Plane (e.g. the Quori), and currently have no official 5e stats. These are Complete Psionic's shadow eft; Champions of Ruin's and ; Epic Level Handbook's Uvuudaum (clearly an aberration) and several abominations (chichimec, dream larva, hetaconcheires, phaethon, phane, and xixecal); Fiend Folio's kaorti (clearly an aberration); Heroes of Horror's phantasmal slayer and unholy scion; Monster Manual 2's ethereal slayer and rukarazyll; Monster Manual 5's ember guard and illurien; Tome of Battle's reth dekala, and Underdark's earth glider. BeardWizard (talk) 18:33, November 27, 2019 (UTC) ****** But the Xill isn't a fiend in 3e. It's an outsider. And as noted above, the Xill doesn't match the description of the 5e fiend type. It's not for us, as editors on a wiki of D&D canon, to put them in a "close enough" category. I think we need to use the older category until we learn otherwise, avoid assigning a 5e type until there's a canonical answer. I wouldn't presume to guess at those others you listed, either. However, I think there's a larger issues to discuss as far as categorization, so I'm creating a new post in Dungeons and Dragons Wiki talk:Editing guidelines with a formal proposal. JEB1981 (talk) 04:48, November 28, 2019 (UTC) ******* In 3e, "fiend" is used to refer to all evil outsiders according to , under "Evil Subtype": "Evil outsiders are also called fiends."; I had been working on that assumption. However, counter-examples exist in the 3.5 Monster Manual: the Angel description on p.10 describes celestials as inhabitants of the "good-aligned Outer Planes", and under Archon on p.16 it is said that fiends are "creatures of the lower planes". You may be correct that 3e evil outsiders of other planes should not be considered fiends by 3e standards. The Xill would thus not be a fiend. BeardWizard (talk) 07:03, November 28, 2019 (UTC)